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How Smart Companies Take on Buzz Marketing

The companies that find success creating buzz focus on products and content.

It seems like every brand is trying to do buzz marketing today.

You can’t turn on the TV or visit a website without some brand promoting a hashtag for Twitter.

Companies are trying to get the world talking about their brand, products and services. It’s interesting to see how brands go about trying to drum up buzz because much of it goes unheard. People for the most part ignore attempts from brands to get people talking.

But I believe creating buzz around your brand can really be beneficial. There seems to be a few common ways successful brands go about generating buzz. Let’s review how they do it.

How to Be Successful with Buzz Marketing

I don’t think the successful way to work buzz marketing is by focusing on all kinds of hashtags. People like creating their own hashtags. They like to be part of groups if they’re following a sports team or if they’re visiting a city. Those things just kind of make sense for people to follow. It’s hard for a brand to force feed a hashtag to consumers to get them talking.

It Starts With The Product

The idea of buzz marketing really needs to be built into the product or service. This doesn’t mean your product has to be sexy or crazy. I always think about the Blendtec blender when I think about buzz marketing.

The company was able to take a pretty ordinary item. They made it so tough that it could chop up almost anything in the world. People don’t really need a blender that can chop up an iPod, but when we see how tough the blender is we figure that if it can chop an iPod it can probably chop our carrots.

The whole Will It Blend campaign was hugely successful at generating buzz and sales.

The buzz was built into the product. The whole buzz marketing campaign was about the product and it showed the usefulness of the blender. It starts with a good product and buzz marketing seems to come as a result of the product being the focus and the reason people are talking.

Buzz Seems To Correlate With Loyalty

Buzz also seems to correlate strongly with loyalty. Again, people are pretty loyal to brands when they feel strongly satisfied with the product or service. People will go out of their way to refer a company if they’ve had a good experience.

Again, there is really nothing a brand can do to encourage this other than provide a great product or service. That’s how you build loyalty and it’s a long-term game.

Give People Something More To Talk About

Let’s get back to the blender idea again.

Not only did Blendtec have a product that was something people could talk about, they created something more that people could talk about. The company created the video series, which is really a form of content marketing that got people talking.

People will talk about products. They’ll also talk about content, experiences and stories. The Blendtec videos gave people a story to tell. It was really easy to send someone a link to a video of a blender chopping up an iPod. People were talking about the blender and they were talking about the video.

You can do things with content to get people talking. Brands are doing it all the time with videos, presentations, blog posts, images, photographs and all kinds of things.

People need something interesting, entertaining and enlightening to share. The focus is often on the product, but content fuels the buzz.

Conclusion

Buzz marketing is something many companies want to master. The trend today is to really push something like a hashtag for Twitter. But that effort just seems wasted because people talk about products and content.

When the company puts the effort on building the buzz into the product and the content they seem to succeed. It also seems like buzz happens over a long period of time.

I always like to mention the music industry for marketing because I think it’s fascinating how the industry works.

It’s incredibly difficult to break a new artist into the mainstream. Everything is working against them.

Those that are successful seem to be the ones that first have a great product. People have to like the song. After that the song or the artist has to have a story. Artists are doing more Get To Know… type videos to share their story and give people something to talk about.

Finally, no artist turns into a star overnight. It can seem like it happens that fast with the first hit, but we forget the years the artist spent building their audience slowly to get there.